WARNING: This will freak you out and if you are having a surgery soon I would not advise you to read this!!!

Okay so last night I watched this video on Youtube about Anesthesia Awareness. (I’ll link it down below if you want to watch it.) What this is is when you’re having a surgery and they need to put you out they use anesthetics. Anesthesia is a temporary induced loss of sensation or awareness. Basically when they give you anesthetics your body is paralyzed so you aren’t able to move or talk. Here is the freaky part, are you ready? 1 out of 700 people will actually be awake during their surgery and they can feel everything. They can feel the doctors cutting into their body and performing the surgery. There are numerous stories of people that have experienced this and they say they were yelling and screaming in their minds but because of the anesthetics they couldn’t actually talk or move to let the doctors know they were actually awake. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to have doctors cut me open and not be able to move or even make a noise. There is this story about a girl who experienced this and the doctors cut open her abdomen and started moving around her organs in her body to get to her kidney, and she could feel everything. How gruesome would it be to be able to feel people moving around your organs. Her surgery lasted 4 hours and she, along with all the other people who have experienced this, said that they wanted to die during the operation, that they were just wishing God would come and take them away so they didn’t have to go through the pain. I don’t know about you but this made me afraid of having a surgery. I’ve never had a surgery in my life and now I hope I never have to. I can’t even imagine what I’d do if this happened to me.

I hope I didn’t freak you out too much, thanks for reading and don’t be afraid to follow for more interesting things like this! Thanks

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10 thoughts on “Anesthesia Awareness”

I am not a doctor, but I must say I am not 100% sure that the guy in the video accurately described why the persons could not move. Again, I am not a doctor, but I will tell my story.

About 7 years ago I had a series of 7 ECT (Electroconvulsive therapies) to help me out of my bipolar depression. The very first time I had an ECT treatment I was one of those rare people that woke up before I should have. The anesthesia wore off too soon. I was not able to move. i was not able to open my eyes. At that very moment, I very vaguely remember not being able to breathe. Obviously that was surely terrifying for me at that time, but I am assuming that someone realized what had happened and I was “put out” again. I’ll assume they administered more anesthesia, and perhaps reinserted the breathing tube. I just assume they had removed it, but I’m not sure.

When I came to the second time I was a bit dazed, but I immediately remembered not being able to breath, open my eyes or move any part of my body.

When a person is administered ECT they not only receive anesthesia and are knocked out, but they also receive a muscle relaxed that makes it so that your body cannot move. This is important because people who receive ECT will have seizures. That is what ECT does deliberately. In my case, my psychiatric medical records indicate that I “woke up before the succinylcholine wore off and she felt she could not breathe.” Given this, yes, my anesthesia wore off and I woke up prematurely, but it wasn’t the anesthesia in my case that made me paralyzed. It was the muscle relaxant succinylcholine still paralyzing me when the anesthesia wore off.

I believe that even non ECT patients at least sometimes receive muscle relaxants. Again, I’m not a doctor, but I think it is the case. I sort of suspect that the paralysis mentioned is not from the anesthesia, but from a muscle relaxant. The problem, however, is probably that the anesthesia just wears off too soon before the muscle relaxant.

If there is a doctor or nurse in the house, I hope he or she will confirm if what I wrote is the case.

Thank you for sharing your story with me. An anesthetic though is actually something that does block pain like a muscle relaxer would do. There are different types of anesthesia that block pain in all different parts of your body. What it does is blocks the nerves in that certain part of your body so you aren’t supposed to feel it. So because there are different types of anesthetics this might be why people react differently, but they are supposed to block pain.

I know that anesthesia blocks pain. But a muscle relaxant makes it so that you can’t move your muscles. I didn’t feel any pain, in my case. I just couldn’t breath. In the case of ECT, I’m not sure if it would even be painful if you had it without anesthesia. But it could be dangerous and painful AND HORRIBLE without muscle relaxants. Believe me, I’m happy I was put out during my ECTs. I’m not happy that I woke up prematurely.

Yeah, well the anesthesia is to block your nerves and nerves are in your muscles so it makes sense that they go together. Nerves are what sense pain so without the anesthesia you would feel the pain. I read an article that said the muscle relaxers could also be to relax your chest muscles so they can put a breathing tube in there and so your body stays relaxed. Muscle relaxers relax the muscles but don’t help with pain, more for so you just don’t have muscle spasms while they’re trying to operate.

I’d like to add one more thing. I’m sure that when I came to the first time, I had either already had the ECT treatment, or it had not yet been administered. I think I would have felt something (probably rather unpleasant) if I was awake and in the midst of having electric shocks administered to my brain. I feel horrible for people who actually feel pain in such a circumstance. Feeling like I couldn’t breathe was bad enough.

If you are very interested in the subject, then it would be great! I’ll admit that I try not to think about that experience too too much. Those were not particularly good weeks for me. Actually the whole year of depression and years of mania before that were terrible.

ECT has very disconcerting memory side effects. They lasted for months after my last treatment. Even though my depression did let up because of the treatments, the experience was generally traumatic. I’m OK now, though.

So you know, after I told the nurse about my horrible experience coming to too early, the anesthesiologist interviewed me at length in the hospital the next day. It was clear that she knew she made a big mistake. She assured me that it wouldn’t happen again. Luckily, it didn’t.

I’m sorry that this happened to you but I’m glad to hear that you are okay now. I hope nothing like this ever happens to you again. Thanks for reading and telling us your story 🙂 and don’t forget to like this post.